SMALL JOINTS #4
Literary it girls, Priscilla, Finding the Money
Small Joints is the monthly newsletter where I share my whims, current obsessions, or recommendations.
Hello and welcome!
NOTE: The beginning of this I wrote a few weeks ago pre the loss of my grandfather, and I still wanted to publish some of these thoughts anyway…
I have new subscribers from my bratty, angry child of an essay “AN ODE TO GETTING PAID” so thank you for joining me. That is so nice!!! And thank you to those who upgraded, I am very touched. I got such nice messages of support after I published that essay and I am full of heart, truly.
There have been a few things that I’ve recently seen related to money and art and stability.
A 2018 profile on Agnès Varda in The Gentlewoman1
Bloomberg interview with Taylor Lorenz2
Sophy Romvari via Twitter on WSJ article by Lane Florsheim3 which I do not have a subscription to read :( on Sofia Coppola having financial strains on the set of Priscilla. She was on the brink of raffling off pickleball games with her and Jacob Elordi to finance a few days of filming.
The gap between being KNOWN and having access to CAPITAL is so wide. However you feel about Taylor Lorenz, reading that part about people wanting to become influencers in order to have stability was so… terrible. The randomness of that type of fame and virality is something I think about all the time and noted in my piece on Tiktok in The Baffler4 in 2020. A kind of virtual social mobility that feels more possible than in real life, where it could happen to the girl-next-door (See Addison Rae and Charli D’amelio).
If you saw, last week for some reason Book Twitter got really upset at the mention of me and my contemporaries being called “Literary It Girls”5 in a piece for the NYLON it girl issue. I wrote about growing up around it girls for their issue last year6 where I end the piece on modern It Girls with, “They post through it all. In a culture where young women are guaranteed to be watched and perceived, it’s hard not to savor the small control they have over their own image, authored by themselves.”
I won’t really address people’s complaints about Literary It Girls because they were a typical brand of misogyny that requires no effort to dish out. People love to seethe over very feminine women. What everyone was missing was the fact that there is a set of writers trying to inject glamour into an unglamorous world…on their own terms and in their own style.
I attended an early screening of Priscilla last night thanks to Elevation Pictures. It would be the kind of film that I would rewatch for its subtleties. At the beginning of the screening, the film was introduced by a gentleman saying it was a “testament to independent film and what happens when you leave the art to the artists.”
If you hated Baz Lurhmann’s Elvis, I would recommend going to the theatres to watch. Priscilla is like an antidote to Luhrmann’s flashy music-video-cum-wikipedia-article. The height difference between Elordi and Cailee Spaeny is so painful that it only underscores how much of a girl Priscilla was (Elvis met her when she was fourteen, and he was twenty-four).
Things that sent me down a wormhole:
“The Star of Half Baked Harvest Inspires Loyalty — and Controversy”
“Inside the ‘Amityville Horror’ house today, Long Island’s most notorious mansion”
“The Real Cancel Culture: Pro-Israel Blacklists”
I can send you the PDF for the WSJ article if you'd like!